ATLANTA — He was not in danger of getting fired, Rams president John Shaw says, but that doesn’t mean things were just fine with Dick Vermeil after last year’s 4-12 wreck.

By the end of the season, players were blowing off team meetings and team flights and there was rampant speculation that Vermeil had lost his team.

“There were a lot of concerns about that,” Shaw said yesterday. “There were a couple of incidents where I was kind of concerned about his interaction with players. We discussed it. I left it up to him, because he was capable of doing whatever he needed to do to correct that. I believe it’s been corrected.”

Vermeil changed dramatically. He lightened up on his practices, he improved his relations with players and he hired Mike Martz to run his offense. It all worked out beyond anyone’s imagination, as the Rams are in Sunday’s Super Bowl and Vermeil was named the NFL’s Coach of the Year.

Will he return if the Rams beat the Titans? Vermeil has two years remaining on his contract, and it’s already decided that whenever he steps aside, Martz moves in as the head coach. Vermeil all week has avoided or talked around the question of his return.

Shaw said he would be “slightly” surprised if Vermeil retired. “I really expect Dick to coach through his contract,” Shaw said. “If we won the Super Bowl, I guess there’s a possibility he’d consider it, though I don’t expect it.”

If the Rams had tied the score in the final seconds of their 24-21 loss to the Titans on Oct. 31, the Titans’ season would have changed dramatically. Turns out the Titans were all set to run their “Music City Miracle” play but the Rams missed on their field-goal attempt and the Titans came away winners, still with their biggest trick in coach Jeff Fisher‘s bag.

“That was the play that was going to be called,” said Frank Wycheck, who made the lateral toss to Kevin Dyson for the touchdown that beat the Bills in the first round of the playoffs. “And if they had scored a touchdown to go ahead, we would have definitely used the play, there’s no doubt about it.”

If the play had been used then, the Bills most likely would have been wise to such a trick on their final kickoff of the year. “At that point you do whatever it took to win that game and worry about other things later,” Wycheck said of the decision to use the trick play early in the year.

Steve McNair continued to show improvement with his injured toe and took 80 percent of the snaps in Titans’ practice yesterday.

McNair did not participate in the opening two-minute drill, however, with backup Neil O’Donnell working at QB. “[McNair] has not done it in eight weeks,” Fisher explained, “and we continue to win.”

The usually cold temperatures in the low 30s prompted a change in today’s practice schedule. Both teams were supposed to practice outdoors but will instead move inside the Georgia Dome. Forecast for today is for snow changing to sleet.

Rams DE Grant Wistrom (shoulder) and WR Torry Holt (shoulder/ribs) returned to practice, but C Mike Gruttadauria did not participate because of the flu.